Video Video Video!!! How can the Mobile Infrastructure industry cope with the booming demand???

The onset of the “smart” multimedia devices viz. the various tablets, smart-phones etc. have revolutionised lives around us. It’s an aphorism that mobile data traffic these days is expanding at a break neck pace. More-so according to the Cisco’s Visual Networking Index Global Mobile Data Forecast, worldwide mobile data traffic could hit 6,300,000 Terabytes per month by 2015.

Interestingly, a lot of this growth is being driven by mobile video. However according to a research conducted by Bytemobile, on a daily basis, about two-fifths of all network traffic is due to the mobile video demands and is only going to increase. The exploding demand to view videos anywhere, anytime, places a huge strain on today’s 3G mobile networks. Networks primarily designed to cater for low bandwidth data like voice and data are now being stretched to offer high bandwidth video services. Service providers too are hence shifting to pay-as-you-play tariff plans, which help in reducing the traffic by regulating the user demand but also tend to kill off any new innovations from the video or the service providers.

This brings me to the wish list of each and every service provider in the market today:-

• More Secure and distributed application processing.

• Infrastructure for broader mobility

• Lower latency than ever before.

• Reduced congestion in core mobile network

• Efficient and high speed traffic optimization.

Citrix NetScaler, being a high end application delivery controller can help the service providers and mobile infrastructure providers in different ways.

1. According to Don Bowman, Sandvine’s CTO, NetScaler in conjunction with a network policy control device like the Sandvine PTS can help mobile carriers reduce both packet core congestion and transit costs, using intelligent traffic redirection based on subscriber, device, and application type. In this scenario, the PTS redirects select mobile 3G or 4G data traffic to NetScaler, which routes the traffic via a direct path to the Internet, while the control plane remains unaffected.

3. Even post adoption of 4G, Carrier Ethernet technology, other futuristic optical and networking technologies the need for an efficient traffic accelerator in core mobile network would be Omni-present and the NetScaler can act as the perfect high speed load balancer and accelerator for these overloaded networks.

4. Long latencies in the mobile core inevitably lead to poor utilization of the available bandwidth. The NetScaler can be used to create a more effective latency-aware congestion management system.

5. The NetScaler can be deployed in the mobile network to provide application visibility thereby making the mobile network more content and application aware at the infrastructure level. Thus ensuring that a sense of security prevails while providing lightning fast browsing facilities.

6. Finally NetScaler has the ability to look into application payload and perform policy processing. On security side NetScaler provides wide variety of features across various protocol layers which help protect the content, infrastructure and endpoint devices.

These may be a few avenues the NetScaler may look at, for not only catering to the current needs for this ever growing market but also carve a niche for future Citrix products designed specifically for this booming industry.